Apple iPhone 6 Plus review: A sharp display and simple design make it a stylish newcower to 'phablet' party

If you're going to be late to the large phone party, this is exactly how you crash it.

It's never a good idea to work behind the trendsetters in technology. Unless you're Apple, that is, and you follow with this kind of polish and perfection.

For the second time in the last three years (remember the iPad Mini that once seemed like it would never happen?), Apple is late to a trend party, but once again, it arrives in style. With the iPhone 6 Plus, Apple finally joins the parade of extra-large smartphones, lending a final touch of legitimacy to the revolution that began with Samsung's Galaxy Note. It starts at the same price as Samsung's Note 4, too, a robust but worthwhile $299.

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But as usual, Apple does it the i-way. It's all about thin and light and elegant and easy to use, and it's about learning from the mistakes of other large smartphones. If you're going to be late to the party, this is exactly how you crash it.

Apple delivered two phones in the 6 and 6 Plus this year, but it's the 6 Plus, with its 5.5-inch full-HD display, that grabs your attention first. It's a device that makes the iPhone 5S and its 4-inch display, just a year old, look positively Lilliputian, especially for anyone who loves watching movies on their smartphone.

Apple rebuilds its smartphone chassis around that rounded, smooth look of the iPad Mini, creating soft, rounded corners and a nice smooth feel. Touch ID, the best fingerprint sensor in the biz (actually, the only one that works) is equipped on the home button, and overall, the phone feels sturdily built.

The 6 Plus doesn't show the least bit of bend under pressure, and there's a comforting weightiness to the device. But oh, that soft metal back! It's a magnet for scratches, so don't tote this phone anywhere unless it's protected in a case. Apple's own 6 Plus Leather Case is your best bet, keeping the smartphone sleek while adding just enough protection.

The screen is the big highlight of this simply designed phone, and, put plainly, it dazzles. Sure, previous iPhone displays have looked good, but the size here is what hits the smartphone sweetspot in this era of tablets; you're not squinting to watch your favorite episode of "How I Met Your Mother," because the display can finally do it justice.

The strength of the 6 Plus screen is its purity of color. The just-released Samsung Galaxy Note 4, with its own lustrous, equally impressive AMOLED display, tends to oversaturate colors, but that's not an issue on the 6 Plus. There's a "natural" look to Professor X's face, and to the grass in the baseball field that Magneto airlifts over to the White House late in the film, and it's something you appreciate.

These days, a beautiful display is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and some will definitely prefer the ultra-vivid Note 4. So it's up to Apple to deliver strong features in other areas, and here, the 6 Plus again does not disappoint.

Both the 6 and 6 Plus sport Apple's new A8 64-bit processor and 1 GB of RAM, and the 6 Plus certainly plays the part of a solid gaming machine. The App Store still rules the smartphone gaming landscape, a major benefit of a 6 Plus over the best that Google has to offer.

And games look tremendous and run snappily on the 6 Plus. Even X-COM: Enemy Unknown, a recent console game ported over to the iPad last year, runs easily, a testament to both the current power of the A8 and, perhaps, its eventual ceiling.

A loaded 8-megapixel camera rounds out the package. The camera protrudes slightly, yet another reason that you'll want a case for your iPhone 6 Plus; left exposed, you have a recipe for dings and dents once again.

The camera lacks the outsized specs of so many Android devices at 8 megapixels, but Apple compensates nicely. You get a solidly powerful flash and you can shoot in HDR, and Apple lets you use the volume keys as your shutter, no longer leaving you at the mercy of on-screen buttons.

The camera has plenty of other impressive features as well, and it's easily the finest camera that Apple has placed in one of its i-devices. There's a panorama feature that only works in portrait mode, and while this initially seems annoying, it winds up being ingenious, allowing you to "pan" upwards to shoot, say, a tower. You can also shoot slow-mo at 240fps, and nice, easy time-lapse as well.

Overall, the camera isn't best-in-class, and nor is it overpowering, but that's never been Apple's M.O. Everything about this camera is easy-to-use and filled with interesting features, as opposed to the nuanced, sometimes over-complicated feature sets of other devices. And the photos are consistently solid. It's a camera built to appeal to the mainstream user, and it worked on me: I'm hardly a photographer, but I've spent the past three weeks looking for ways to use the time-lapse and slow-motion video features.

All of this makes for a solid phone, but in typical Apple fashion, polish and ingenuity are added to try to place this device over its peers.

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The key trick here is an attempt to make one-handed use a little more friendly. With a double-tap of your home button, you can tell the 6 Plus to use only the bottom half of its display.

It's a way of making an extra-large phone usable with just one hand, and, by and large, it works effectively, but it surrenders a lot of real estate, and it has minor, App-specific issues. You can't actually type in this mode in Facebook, for example, and if you try to type in Twitter, it returns you to the full-screen mode.

Some will find it useful, but really, if you got a big phone, aren't you expecting to have to use both hands, anyway?

There are other issues, albeit minor ones, with the 6 Plus as well. Once again, the speaker sits on the bottom of the device, a far cry from the handy stereo setup of the HTC One M8, and this can be an annoyance for gamers.

But by and large, this is a memorable "phablet" debut for Apple. Sure the iPhone 6 Plus is late to the extra-large club, and no, it doesn't completely blow the new Note 4 out of the water.

But from display to camera to a solid feature set, it's still going to make an impact. And anyone who's been waiting for a bigger iPhone is going to be completely satisfied.